The environment consists of 2 blade enclosures located in 2 datacenters and basically the migration steps were:

Prepare VMWare ESX-i on separate disks in a few spare blades and pre-deploy XenApp VM’s on it.

Expand the existing blade servers with an extra physical CPU and additional memory.

Final migration: just swap the disks (as little impact for the users as possible)/

Step 1 and 2 were already completed so the most important and final step was yesterday and, as in each migration, we had a few small challenges we needed to fix:

Change of Raid SettingsWhen we started swapping the hard drives we did of course shut down the blade servers but 2 servers were configured for auto power on. During the drive swap those 2 servers powered on automagically and this caused data loss on the disks.

It wasn’t a big deal because we could rapidly redeploy both VMWare and the VM’s, XenApp and Applications but my advise is: take the blade out of the enclosure before swapping the drives!

Virtual Machines halted at 95% on Power On

When Powering On the Virtual Machines they appeared with a yellow exclamation mark in the vSphere console and the Power On operation halted at 95 percent:

Launching the console shows us the reason and selecting “I moved it” made the VM Power On immediately: